Ahh, the example in your picture isn't a tooltip but is known as a "thread preview" which we currently have set to off. This is mainly to encourage users to view threads (and hopefully reply while in them) versus just hovering over the few word preview and moving onward. I can't say I have plans to enable it soon, but the possibility is always there in the future.

Ah ok, I wasn't sure what vBulletin called it, although I think by website design terminology it is a function of Spry/AJAX scripting (tooltip widget)?

I saw you mentioned earlier about trying to save some bandwidth, wouldn't this help with that? Cause instead of people having to load an entire page they could just quick-preview a thread to see if it is something they may want to reply to.

As for the tooltip idea I was speaking of, they wouldn't be clickable links with a destination page. It would basically be words that when hovered over would show the equivalent of what a title tag does to images when you mouseover them.

Yeah, I was thinking about the sites that have blue double-underlined words (which look like links but with an extra underline) that trigger a advertisement or something else. But I just ran up DW and did a simple tooltip script on a word, and it definitely does not underline it (see attachment).

Would be pretty nifty if you guys could pull that off

Regarding post preview, yes it is a stock feature in vBulletin (from what I know, in both 3 and 4). There is no way to disable it or allow users to turn it on/off when making posts that I am aware of, at least I couldn't find such an option in the ACP. If such a thing existed that would be an acceptable alternative to us removing the preview code itself, but if not the other option I mentioned before may work... we could simply readd it but modify its location to appear below the Post Submit versus above.

If you see (in another Forum using vB) the option to turn it on/off take a screenshot of the location and I will look into this further as that would definitely interest me and make some users happy I'm sure.

I've never seen a VB board that allowed users to turn it off via the CP or from the post itself, however if a user doesn't want to preview their post, they don't need to click the preview button right? They can simply proof read from the editor and then submit the post?

On the thread preview, bandwidth isn't the issue, what is for us is server load... the more SQL queries that are called per user at any one time is what lags the server but we actually have lots of unused bandwidth as traffic has been dropping off since the initial JailBreak craze is slowly phasing out. Our main concern with turning on the "thread preview" is fewer people going into threads to view them and posting a reply, but if the Forums become more active then perhaps we can enable it.

As for the post preview, I will have to re-enable it when time permits to refresh my memory on exactly why it was removed as it sounds like you have a valid point... on the downside, we have a list of around 18 other things that need to be sorted/ported/fixed. It will happen, just when is the question. Right now (as I write this) we are working on fixing the Download section META data, so the fun never ends.

On the downside, the site does seem to be pretty slow lately around here (post/news wise not loading wise), it seems less and less PS3 hack news articles are surfacing, wonder if Sony succeeded in scaring people from releasing any new info. Either way perhaps this is a nice break for you guys to get the new site in order before it explodes with activity again.

Ahh, the example in your picture isn't a tooltip but is known as a "thread preview" which we currently have set to off. This is mainly to encourage users to view threads (and hopefully reply while in them) versus just hovering over the few word preview and moving onward. I can't say I have plans to enable it soon, but the possibility is always there in the future.

While I understand the possition of someone who runs forum to prefer users to click on thread and read it in full (and hopefully participate more - apart of also reading ads) this also goes two ways. I simply tend to skip / ignore threads with a "generic" / non-decriptive titles like:

- Help
- Read this ...
- Look what I've found
- Do you think ...

or simply somenthing I might thing I'd be not interrested in etc. etc. However at Forums where this "tooltip" preview is available I'm more likely to clik / open the thread and participate. You can also consider (if possible indeed) this as a "optional" feature for senior / premium members only maybe?

I'm really sorry to see more and more sites dissabling this feature - mainly purelly due to the "commercial" reasons however as just mentioned above it could be contraproductive in some situations.

In regards to preview - I'm not a big user of that but if it would be optional only I'd have use for that time to time.

Also - I too prefer a "time stamp" (date / time) rather that time passed from option currently used here.

As far as for the amount of post etc. - again - I understand your possition on this but I believe it's benefitial to the users and again if it could be offered at least to senior / premium users it would be nice and in general resolve the problems with spam or any other kind of misuse.

I know there is still a long way in front all of us before this all will get in shape but I like a majority of the new changes of the forums and hope to see this through together with all others here.

Similar to the time/date format, the "thread preview" is a global vBulletin setting so it would require a plug-in probably to make it an option for specific UserGroups. I don't believe that such plug-ins exist for vB4 yet, but we can check into it when time permits... or if anyone gets bored and wants to save us some time, take a peek around vBulletin.org (the vB plug-in site) and if you find one post it here and we can try installing it.

Update: I have now re-added Preview for Registered+ UserGroups... we are keeping it off for Newbies so that it is more difficult for spammers to manipulate their junk posts to bypass the censoring, moderation queue and trigger word system in place. Hopefully this will make everyone happy, those who want to Preview their posts will need to become a Registered User first basically.

I know it's possible to get notifications to threads you replied in via subscription, but on a quote-level I can't say I've seen such a vB Mod myself. I can look into it when time permits though, and yep... soon we will be (finally) getting to the new Facebook page, logo, etc!

We just have a few other things ahead of it that I'd like to wrap up, including porting the vB4 Forum navbar to our main page so that the overall look and layout of our Portal and Forum is consistent.

Yep, once you get used to it vB4 is not bad... it definitely still is buggy though, and at times it amazes me that it went gold but we ended up fixing some of the more critical issues ourselves and it's been up and running OK for the last few weeks now.

I do miss vB3 at times, but to keep up with the times I guess the upgrade was inevitable. Hopefully soon we can add a few vB4 styles so that users can select from other color choices while browsing the boards here.